I hope you all have had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday! Luckily, most of Thanksgiving’s rain occurred early in the morning, leaving the daylight hours mainly cloudy with a few sprinkles.

It’s time to venture out into the long range world once again, but this time I’m not going to be forecasting extremely wet weather! In fact, just the opposite. Long range forecast models have been very consistent in building a huge ridge of high pressure over our area keeping us dry for at least a week and a half, if not more.

Now I have a bit of good news and bad news depending on what kind of weather enthusiast you are. Weather models have been going back and forth between how dramatic the temperatures will be by next weekend and beyond as the ridge continues to strengthen. I’m not exactly seeing any warm anomalies in the models, mainly cold. I’m not even going to mention how cold, but we could be flirting with some cold days and nights in the not too distant future if models are right.

Of course, the next question is: “If we’re going to be cold enough for snow…will it snow?” Before we even talk about snow, we need moisture, and it appears we’ll be lacking if any cold air does arrive because it looks like a “dry cold”, similar to the November 2006/January 2007 arctic intrusion. Yeah we had some snow, but not a whole lot, and it was mostly powdery and dry.

Because of the high uncertainty regarding model guidance, I am too chicken to make any long range predictions at this point. I’ll continue to monitor each run to see if I can find further consistency.

Until then, enjoy the dry weather! Today will be wet at times, but next week will be wonderful for the first week of December!

Matthew Leach

Forecasting Kitsap

Questions? Comments? E-mail me at: forecastingkitsap@live.com

7 DAY FORECAST